Breakthroughs

pulling and stepping, of watching cans bright with their tinning go into the machine and cans gaudy with their labels stream out. The machine asked no questions she would sooner not have answered. The machine asked no questions at all.

As she had at the lunch whistle, Sylvia started when the quitting whistle screamed. It was dark when she clocked out and walked to the trolley stop, but not quite so dark as it had been earlier in the year. Twilight lingered in the west, a harbinger of spring ahead. It was the only harbinger of spring she could find; the wind cut like a knife.

She had to stand almost all the way back to the stop by her apartment building. Except for lunch, she’d been standing since she got to the plant. Now that she’d returned from that mechanistic world, she felt how tired she was. Her legs didn’t want to hold her up any more. When she finally did get to sit down, she nearly fell asleep before the streetcar got to her stop. She’d done that once, and walked back more than a mile. This time, she didn’t, but getting up and getting off the trolley were more mind over matter than anything else.

She checked her mailbox in the entrance hall to the apartment building. No letter from George, which meant he hadn’t come to port as of a few days before, which meant he hadn’t had the chance to get into trouble in a port. He might have got into trouble on the sea, but that was a different sort of trouble, and one over which she worried in a different sort of way.

Circulars from the Coal Board, the Scrap Metal Collection Agency, the Ration Board, the Victory Over Waste Committee, and the War Savings and Tax Board helped fill the mailbox. So did one from an agency new to her, the Paper Conservation Authority, which informed her in the portentous bureaucratic tones of any government outfit that paper was an important war resource and should not be wasted.

“Then why do I get so much worthless paper every day?” she muttered, tossing the multicolored sheets into the battered wastebasket there. The answer to that was only too clear: “Because one board writes this and none of the others read it, that’s why.”

She went upstairs to reclaim her children from Brigid Coneval, who, after her husband was conscripted, had decided to take in the children of other women who got jobs in factories instead of getting a factory job herself. Each flight of stairs seemed to have twice as many as the one before, and each step twice as high.

When she came out into the hallway, she walked down the hall to Mrs. Coneval’s flat to get George, Jr., and Mary Jane and take them back to her own apartment, where she would make supper and let them play till they were ready for bed-or, more likely, till she was ready for bed and managed to persuade them that they should lie down, too.

They were getting harder to persuade. George, Jr., was six now, heading toward seven, and Mary Jane nearly four. Sylvia needed more sleep these days, while they needed less. It hardly seemed fair.

With so many children in Brigid Coneval’s flat, shrieks and cries as Sylvia came up were the order of the day. But the shrieks and cries that Sylvia heard now did not come from the throats of children. Fear shot through her, sharp as if she’d seized a live electric wire. She had to will herself to knock, and then had to knock twice to make anyone inside notice her.

The woman who opened the door was not Brigid Coneval, though she looked very much like her. Seeing Sylvia, George, Jr., and Mary Jane came running up and embraced her. Above them, Sylvia asked the question she dreaded, the question that had to be asked: “Is she-? Is it-?”

“It is that.” The woman, doubtless Brigid’s sister, had a brogue like hers, too. “Less than an hour ago, the telegram came. Down in Virginia he was, poor man, and never coming back from there again.”

“That’s dreadful. I’m so sorry,” Sylvia said, feeling the inadequacy of words. She knew what Brigid Coneval was feeling. She’d twice thought George lost, once when his fishing boat was captured by a Confederate commerce raider and once when his river monitor was blown out of the water. The only thing that had saved him then was that he hadn’t been aboard, but on the riverbank, drunk and about to lie down with a colored strumpet.

She couldn’t even say she understood, for Brigid’s sister would not believe her. Then she found a new worry, different but in its own way no less urgent: while Brigid Coneval mourned, who would take care of the children when she had to go to work?

IV

Sam Carsten swabbed the deck of the USS Dakota with a safety line tied round his waist. The battleship pitched like a toy boat in a rambunctious boy’s bathtub, chewing its way over and through waves that put to shame any others he’d ever known.

He shouted to his bunkmate, Vic Crosetti, who plied a mop not far away: “Everything they say about Cape Horn is true!”

“Yeah,” Crosetti shouted back, through the howl of the wind. “Only trouble is, they don’t say near enough, the tight-mouthed sons of bitches.”

There was nothing tight-mouthed about him. He was a voluble Italian, little and swarthy and hairy and ugly as a monkey. Carsten, by contrast, was tall and muscular, with pink skin and hair so blond, it was almost white.

Crosetti leered at him. “You sunburned yet, Sam?”

“Fuck you,” Carsten said amiably. He’d burned in San Francisco. Christ, he’d burned in Seattle. Duty in the Sandwich Islands and the tropical Pacific had been a hell of burning and peeling and zinc oxide and half a dozen other ointments that didn’t do any good, either. “I finally find weather that suits me, and what do I get? A scrawny dago giving me a hard time.”

Had some men called him a scrawny dago, Crosetti would have answered with a kick in the teeth or a knife in the ribs. When Sam did, he grinned. Carsten had a way of being able to talk without ticking people off. He even had trouble starting brawls in waterfront saloons.

Another enormous swell sweeping along from west to east lifted the Dakota to its crest. For a moment, Sam could see a hell of a long way. He spotted another battleship from the U.S. force that had set out from Pearl Harbor for Valparaiso, Chile, the autumn before-except autumn meant nothing in the Sandwich Islands and was spring down in Chile. Farther off, he made out a U.S. armored cruiser and a couple of the destroyers that guarded the big battlewagons from harm.

He also spied a Chilean armored cruiser. But for the different flag and different paint job-the Chileans preferred a sky blue to the U.S. gray-it looked the same as its American counterpart. It should have; it had come out of the Boston Navy Yard.

Pointing to it, Carsten said, “We sold the Chileans their toys, and England sold the Argentines theirs. Now we get to find out who’s a better toymaker.”

“Hell with all of ’em,” Crosetti said. “If Argentina was on our side, Chile’d be in bed with the limeys. But Argentina’s keeping England fed, so Chile ends up playin’ on our team. Big deal, you ask me.”

“Hey, listen, if Argentina was on our side, we’d be sailing east to west, straight into all these damn waves and this stinking wind instead of riding with ’em. How’d you like that?”

“No thanks,” Crosetti said at once.

Carsten got a faraway look in his eyes. “How’d you like to try sailing east to west through here in a ship without an engine-I mean really sailing through here?” he said. Crosetti crossed himself. Sam laughed. “Yeah, that’s how I feel about it, too.”

“They were tough bastards in the old days,” Vic Crosetti said. “Stupid bastards, too, to want to come down to such a god-forsaken corner of the world.”

Before Carsten could answer that, klaxons started hooting, a noise hideous enough to cut through the raging wind. Everyone on deck undid his safety line and ran for his battle station. Sam had no idea whether it was a drill or whether some destroyer up ahead had spotted British or Argentine or maybe even French ships. He knew he had to treat the noise as if shells would start dropping around-or on-the Dakota at any moment.

The battleship sank into the trough between waves, plunging her bow steeply downward. Sam’s foot skidded on seawater. He flailed his arms wildly, and somehow managed to keep from falling on his face. Then his shoes rang on metal rungs as he went below.